--On Thursday, February 04, 2010 8:36 AM -0600 Robert Nichols <rnicholsNOSPAM at comcast.net> wrote: > Looks like that's about all you can do. USB devices aren't available > until hotplug discovers them, and that's proceeding in parallel with the > rest of the boot sequence. Be sure to put a timeout in that loop lest it > hang forever if that external device is absent. Even better would be to make the script event-driven and launched by the hotplug process. Then there's no busy-wait. This page has some info: <http://linux.die.net/man/8/hotplug> The detail links on this page aren't working for me but look promising: <http://linux-hotplug.sourceforge.net/>